Out of the Shadow: Revisiting the Revolution from Post-Peace Guatemala - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1477320857 ISBN 13: 9781477320853

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2020

Synopsis

Guatemala’s “Ten Years of Spring” (1944–1954) began when citizens overthrew a military dictatorship and ushered in a remarkable period of social reform. This decade of progressive policies ended abruptly when a coup d’état, backed by the United States at the urging of the United Fruit Company, deposed a democratically elected president and set the stage for a period of systematic human rights abuses that endured for generations. Presenting the research of diverse anthropologists and historians, Out of the Shadow offers a new examination of this pivotal chapter in Latin American history.

Marshaling information on regions that have been neglected by other scholars, such as coastlines dominated by people of African descent, the contributors describe an era when Guatemalan peasants, Maya and non-Maya alike, embraced change, became landowners themselves, diversified agricultural production, and fully engaged in electoral democracy. Yet this volume also sheds light on the period’s atrocities, such as the US Public Health Service’s medical experimentation on Guatemalans between 1946 and 1948. Rethinking institutional memories of the Cold War, the book concludes by considering the process of translating memory into possibility among present-day urban activists.

About this title

About the Author

Julie Gibbings is a lecturer in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and the author of the forthcoming Our Time Is Now: Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala.

Heather Vrana is an assistant professor of history at the University of Florida and the author of This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944–1996.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1477320857
• ISBN 13: 9781477320853
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Gibbings Julie, Vrana Heather